All over the world, citizens are taking the Food Revolution into their own hands, becoming urban bee-keepers, guerilla planters, rooftop gardeners, foodie activists. While community engagement and political lobbying are vital to these grassroots movements, so too could be design. By designing our cities – our public and civic spaces, our hospitals and schools – with food in mind, we can facilitate this Revolution by making food a visible part of urban life, thus allowing us to take that crucial first step: eliminating the physical/conceptual distance between us and our food.

Peter Harnik, director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land and author of Urban Green believes that parks and urban density can have a healthy symbiotic relationship. Parks near density are better cared for and provide benefits to more people; city homes and businesses near parks enjoy higher property values and soften urban hardscape. (If well designed, parks also help filter stormwater before it becomes runoff.)

The combined municipal government of Miami and Dade County, Florida seems to agree. The parks department wants to find investors willing to take vacant and obsolete properties such as old strip malls and turn them into updated housing, commercial property, and public parks, as part of the same concept. For a 10-acre parcel, for example, the idea would be to use two or three acres for immediate green space, reserving the rest for mixed-use development. The presence of the park would attract people and raise the value of the adjacent land for development.

Sprawling land development has been consuming our nation’s countryside at an alarming rate. Sprawl is defined as development that is dispersed, auto-dependent, single use, and impossible to walk to your daily needs. It is usually located along highways and in rural areas outside urban and village centers. There is a growing general awareness that low-density residential development threatens farmland and open space, raises public service costs, encourages people and wealth to leave central cities, creates serious traffic congestion, and degrades the environment and our quality of life. In the words of James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, "The living arrangements Americans now think of as normal are bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically and spiritually." In response to these trends, public interest groups, citizens and even government at all levels have begun to develop solutions for curbing sprawl, preserving open space, and rebuilding our cities and older suburbs. Smart growth initiatives identify the relationship between development patterns and quality of life by implementing new policies and practices promoting better housing, transportation, economic development and preservation of environmental quality.

This video, animated by Warren Lehrer with Brandon Campbell, features the words of Eugene Hütz–leader of the gypsy-punk-cabaret band Gogol Bordello—sharing his views on ‘globalization’ and putting forward an alternative vision of what he calls “multi-kontra culture.” This video with sound production and arrangement by Judith Sloan is the newest manifestation of Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan’s multi-media project, Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, which documents and portrays new immigrants and refugees in the United States.

Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are essentially refugees who have not crossed an international border. Many estimates of IDP numbers include those displaced by natural disasters alongside those displaced by war and persecution.

In 2010, an estimated 27.5 million people were internally displaced by conflict, including 5 million in Sudan, 4 million in Colombia, 2 million in Iraq, 2 million in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 1.5 million in Somalia. Figures for IDPs are necessarily estimates since no internal authority is officially counting how many citizens each national government has failed to protect.

An expansive study by the Pew Research Center details what it describes as "the rise of Asian-Americans," a highly diverse and fast-growing group making up nearly 6 percent of the U.S. population. Mostly foreign-born and naturalized citizens, their numbers have been boosted by increases in visas granted to specialized workers and to wealthy investors as the U.S. economy becomes driven less by manufacturing and more by technology.

"Too often the policy debates on immigration fixate on just one part — illegal immigration," said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California-Riverside and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "U.S. immigration is more diverse and broader than that, with policy that needs to focus also on high-skilled workers."

In the 21st century we are working in an entirely new context, for which we need new types of cities. As noted by Ulrich Beck, we have arrived in 'a new era of uncertainty’, where energy, water and food supply are critical. ‘We live in a world of increasingly non-calculable uncertainty that we create with the same speed of its technological developments.’ (Beck, 2000)

The TwentyEleven project by Architects Chris Idema and Reinier Simons is an attempt create a multifunctional Fab Workshop as well as dwellings for the inhabitants of the slums of Kibera. According to them

"...Together with 236 inhabitants (including 52 families, 15 small companies and three workshops (two specialized in wood, one of which will become a concrete workshop and one metal), of the slums in Nairobi, we will develop a new building plan for the future inhabitants of the TwentyEleven complex..."

"Why should we westerners disrupt this culture? Our goal, in a country that is not our own and a culture that does not belong to us, is one of ‘letting go’. Give the Kenyans a new vision, a new idea and a system to build with, but give them a chance to have their say and let them do the building. The bond between an inhabitant and his home is one of great importance, an intensive cooperation process will help with this..."

"...We looked at how the people live in the situation they are in, what their social activities are and what is needed to survive in a slum like Kibera. These and other elements are set in a well-developed plan, which looks at the current way of life and interaction in a slum and improves the two. A newly gained freedom in combination with all the necessities like hygiene, clean water, a controlled cooking environment and better living conditions in general ensure that 236 scorned slum-dwellers rise in status and that with less worries about their housing situation, they will have more time and energy to develop themselves, their children and their environment...."

"As the philosopher Peter Singer has put it, the communications revolution has spawned a “global audience” that creates the basis for a “global ethics.” If we identify ourselves with the nation, our morality remains national. But, if we increasingly associate ourselves with the world at large, our loyalties will expand, too. Similarly, the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen speaks of our “multiple identities” – ethnic, religious, national, local, professional, and political – many of which cross national boundaries.

It is unclear how much of this is wishful thinking and how much is based on real shifts in identities and attachments. Survey evidence shows that attachment to the nation-state remains quite strong.

A few years ago, the World Values Survey questioned respondents in scores of countries about their attachments to their local communities, their nations, and to the world at large. Not surprisingly, those who viewed themselves as national citizens greatly outnumbered those who regarded themselves as world citizens. But, strikingly, national identity overshadowed even local identity in the United States, Europe, India, China, and most other regions.

The same surveys indicate that younger people, the highly educated, and those who identify themselves as upper class, are more likely to associate themselves with the world. Nevertheless, it is difficult to identify any demographic segment in which attachment to the global community outweighs attachment to the country."

Dani Rodrik is a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a leading scholar of globalization and economic development.

The author finds it particularly problematic that cultural identity is commonly conceived as a fixed and exclusive entity with an inherently positive moral imperative. An alternative, dynamic view is thus presented emphasizing continuing development beyond the perimeters of one's ascribed or primary cultural identity. In this approach, the concept of "intercultural identity" is employed as an extension of, and a counterpoint to, cultural identity. Grounded in an open systems perspective, the identity development beyond one's primary culture is explained in terms of the internal stress-adaptation growth dynamic, a psychological response to the challenges of interfacing with differing cultural identities. Such intercultural challenges are described as the very force that "pushes" an individual in the direction of greater intercultural learning, perceptual refinement, and a self-other orientation that is at once individuated and universalized.

“In 2008, 20 million persons have been displaced by extreme weather events, compared to 4.6 million internally displaced by conflict and violence over the same period,” reports the IOM. And by the middle of the century (that’s just about the time that immigrants will constitute one-fifth of the U.S. population), there might be as many as 200 million environmental migrants–sometimes called “climate refugees“–around the world, moving within or across borders.

Doug Saunders’s first book, “Arrival City,” reads like a special issue of The Economist, that estimable weekly, in ways that are mostly good but sometimes not. You can envision its subtitle stamped in 18-point type on the magazine’s cover: “How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World.”

He presents these fringe worlds not as fetid ghettos or pots of simmering radicalism. Instead, he argues, they are kilns of reverberating energy and optimism where the world’s rural downtrodden seek a foothold in the modern world. These people — losers to too many of us, though not to themselves or to those they left behind in small villages — wish to receive the developed world’s simplest yet most grace-filled benediction: a chance, through hard work, to enter the flowing middle class. We frustrate their desires at our economic, social and moral peril.

The concept of smart cities has become more and more popular in the general public.

As the graph on the left testifies, during the last year it has been more mentioned on Twitter than other fashionable and development-related concepts (such as "digital economy" or "creative class"), and its trend is growing quicker.

The main reason, at least from a European perspective, is due to the choice of using this concept as a key policy instrument in reaching EU 2020 targets on climate change mitigation.

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